I am delighted to announce the name of the DHSB School Captain for the coming year.
Earlier today William Henwood 12 KRB accepted the post following a rigorous selection process with an extremely strong field. I am sure he will be very successful in his new leadership role.
Our current School Captain, Eden Hingston, will provide support in a handover period during the next few weeks and later this term there will be time to thank her for her extensive contribution to the life of the school community.
Eden said, “William strongly impressed us all throughout the application process. In my opinion, he exhibited intelligence, charisma, moral character and articulacy. I’m excited to see his personal take on leadership and I'm sure he will excel in the role of School Captain. I look forward to working with Will in the weeks to come".
Equality Project
We are excited to announce that the Plymouth Racial Equality Council will be supporting DHSB in a new project.
We will be working with equality and representation of students from a global majority in school, an inclusive curriculum with student input, steering groups of student voice, and parent/carer forums.
We are looking for students to be involved in a new steering group, regularly meeting and creating opportunities and celebration of all students in school, and we are delighted to be opening up an initial meeting for parents and young people who would be interested in contributing and/or being part of this project.
The initial open forum is to meet the representatives from the Plymouth Racial Equality Council (PREC) and staff involved, and find out more information or volunteer lived experience of racial discrimination.
This will be for students and parents on Wednesday 9 October at 5:00pm in the Conference (to the right of the visitor reception) with refreshments provided.
Please contact Mrs Luing-Holmes if you have any questions or would like more information about the forum.
You can read more about our approach to Equality on our website at this link.
And this link will take you to our published strategy document.
Lord Lieutenant’s Cadets
On Tuesday 1 October, Air Cadets Flight Sergeant Giles Pahdi and Flight Sergeant Jack Benzie, both in 12NGW, were invested as Lord Lieutenant’s Cadets for Devon for 2024 - 25 in recognition of outstanding service in the cadet force of Devon.
They will spend the next year assisting the Lord Lieutenant of Devon in high profile civic and military occasions throughout the county as well as acting as ambassadors for the wider cadet movement. Their role may include accompanying the Lord Lieutenant in royal visits, Armed Forces Day and Remembrance events.
This appointment is an enormous privilege and considered the highlight of a cadet’s career.
Matthew Haycock, Officer Commanding 197 Squadron, said, “This is a very high award for their hard work as part of the Royal Air Force Air Cadets. They should both be very proud of what they have achieved and are excellent role models for the Air Cadets and for DHSB".
Matthew has shared their official citations, linked here.
Many congratulations to Giles and Jack.
We hope you both have a fantastic year supporting the Lord Lieutenant in Devon.
Excellent Work
Mrs Mintoft has shared our examples of Excellent Work this week.
She said, “ Year 9 History students have made an excellent start to their understanding of medieval warfare. Here are three examples where the students have gone above and beyond with their presentation and effort to produce some excellent work. Rio, Jacob and Rafferty have all shown a fantastic level of determination both in class and on homeworks”.
Student Activities
Many thanks to Alexander Deeming 12NGW for sharing this book recommendation.
He said, “I would recommend Life of Pi by Yan Martel”.
Thank you Alexander. Has anyone else read this?
Very well done to Ben Silverwood 8S who has passed Grade 5 in classical guitar.
Also at the end of last term, Ben found out that he had been successful in auditioning for the National Youth Guitar Ensemble. He will now attend monthly rehearsals with NYGE at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff and a residential course each Easter.
Brilliant news - well done.
Thank you to Luke Madgett 11S who has shared an insight into his work writing a large language model with an example of his code shown below.
Luke wrote, “Over the summer I wrote a large language model (like ChatGPT) from scratch. This works by reading in a very large set of text and then 'training' on that - learning how the English language is structured. This allows it, from a prompt, to write its own text, exactly like you would use ChatGPT. This took many hours of coding and following tutorials, looking at scientific papers, and online documentation for various python libraries to get it to work! It is not as good as ChatGPT, but this is not surprising as this was trained on just my PC's graphics card, whereas GPT-4o (the latest model used for ChatGPT) was trained on tens of thousands - a slight difference!”.
Well done Luke. If you’d like to read more then please click here.
Well done to Harry Becker 8W who has passed out as a Royal Marine Cadet after completing his basic training as a recruit. He attends twice a week in the evenings and has completed drill, outdoor phys and map reading amongst other team building activities.
Harry will continue to attend as a Cadet and should be very proud.
Congratulations to Akshaj Rajguru 8T who is an active member of St Johns Ambulance Cadets.
Akshaj has successfully completed a ten hour programme designed to enhance his knowledge and skills in first aid.
We will all be in safe hands if we need first aid treatment - well done!
Don't forget you can let us know what you have been doing by completing this form. I've enjoyed reading all your news and look forward to sharing more next week and in future Head's Blogs.
Please complete this Google Form if you have something for me to include.
Sparx Maths and Sparx Reader
Each week we celebrate our highest performers in both Sparx Maths and Sparx Reader, two of our core homework platforms. We are proud of all of our students who complete their homework each week to such a high standard but these students deserve a special mention.
Congratulations!
Sports Update
A very busy week of sports fixtures with mixed results to report.
Football
In the national cup, Year 9 and Year 11 both played teams from Tavistock with our Year 11 team unfortunately losing 2 - 1 and our Year 9 team securing a win.
Mr Strang said, “In an exciting start to their season, the Year 9 football team kicked off with a 5 - 3 victory over Tavistock in the national cup clash. Star of the match was Sam Gibbs 9S who delivered an impressive hat trick to help lead the team to victory. With this strong performance, the team will look to carry their momentum into their next fixture against Sir John Hunt, set for next week. A great opener for the Year 9 squad, showing promise for the season ahead”.
The Year 10 team lost their first round match against Ivybridge 1 - 0 but the 1st XI made a winning start to the season, beating Peninsula Medical School 3 - 1 in the Wednesday League Premier Division.
Well done!
1st XI
Rugby
In the Devon Cup the Year 10 team lost to a strong Plymouth College side, and the Year 8 squad won a game and lost a game at the central venue competition.
Mr Callicott has also reported on the Year 7 central venue competition.
He said, This was a great night of rugby. The Year 7 team played two games and won two. Excellent commitment”.
Year 10
Year 8
Year 7
Well done to all students who have taken part in sports fixtures this week and a big thank you to the members of staff who have facilitated these opportunities.